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It’s Easter weekend and a lot of people are away for the holiday. When we sent out our e-mail newsletter this week, one listener’s auto-reply featured this quote:

“Spring has returned. The earth is like a child that knows poems.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Indeed the telltale signs of spring — green shoots, the earliest hints of flower buds — arrived a bit earlier here this year in the upper Midwest. This new-found greenery, combined with the approaching Easter weekend, reminds me of a beloved program we aired this time last year with Vigen Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian and master gardener. Here’s one of his quotes from “Restoring the Senses” that I particularly like:

“…the garden was a place where things came to life, you know? It was in point of fact a reaffirmation of life and, and something to sustain faith, hope and to go on living.”

I’m a novice grower of green things but an experiment last summer with cultivating seeds in a window box on my fire escape spurred my thinking about “garden lessons” that have larger life resonance — like how you have to harvest what you sow and cut away the decaying stuff so that new growth can emerge. How true.

Reflections

I believe St.John of the Cross was a gardener. His writings on "the dark night of the soul" came to me when I learned that all things greening do their growing in the dark. They work to collect sunlight during the day, then at night use that energy to grow. Consolation for dry times! I've always pictured the soul as a living, green thing.

I remember a line from Chauncey Gardner in the Peter Sellers film Being There (based on the novel of the same name by Jerzy Kosinski) where Chauncey, having been evicted from his garden, comments to the President in a coversation on the economy: All will be well unless the roots are severed. So roots are also an important part of the gardening metaphor insofar as Chauncey had been evicted from the only home he had known, reflecting Jerzy Kozinski's own uprooting from his home in Poland, who later came to the US seeking political asylum.